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Review: Winning Colors, By Elizabeth Moon

When Winning Colors starts Lady Cecelia is slightly miffed to find Heris as the legal owner of her yacht; this as a end result of her family trying to protect her interests while she was in a coma. Cecelia solves this by chartering the yacht, and off they go to pursue Cecelia’s interest in horses – first at the Wherrin Trials and then when she sets out to buy bloodstock for her breeding farm. During the latter they visit a border system that begs for assistance against raiders, and now Heris’ return to Fleet starts, step by step…

Spoiler warning
I actually got a bit disappointed when Moon neatly solves the problem with Heris’ romance with Kinvinnard Petris with “OK, we love each other but being in space/Fleet is more important”. Romance is seldom one of the important driving forces for me, by which I mean that romance isn’t an important component when judging if a book is good or not BUT this romance was introduced in Hunting Party as a reason important enough for the characters not to return to Fleet, so this feels kind of weak.End spoiler

The parallel thread here is about counterfeit rejuvenation drugs, and about the political implications of the rich staying young and on top forever while their progeny and the working class is held (virtually) in stasis and subjugation resprectively.

Despite this it’s an entertaining and sometimes funny adventure – those who want to skip the politics can just ignore it, while we who want that kind of padding gets our share.

And – finally everything comes together, something that is emphasised by THE END being the very last words of the final paragraph – not what I’d imagined when I started reading Hunting Party about ten days ago, but ultimately very rewarding.